Brian May: Queen would like to play Glastonbury with Adam Lambert

The guitarist was speaking at this year’s Ivor Novello awards, which took place yesterday in London, where he told Bang Showbiz the band would be interested in playing if Adam Lambert were available to join them.

“Look, these things get put on the table; it would be interesting to do Glastonbury if we were an operational unit at the time,” he said. “You see, this year Adam’s off doing his solo work at the moment so it wouldn’t have worked. You only look at things that are possible logistically at the time.”

Lambert has made a great success of standing in for the late Freddie Mercury as frontman of Queen. While the band may not have recaptured their stadium-filling status of the 1980s, they have garnered rave reviews for their arena shows. The Guardian’s review of their most recent tour noted that “this show succeeds because of Adam Lambert, not despite him. The 32-year-old has said he wants to celebrate the flamboyant, camp, gay Mercury rather than replace him, but he definitely has the Freddie factor.”

Speaking to Gigwise at the awards, May said there were no plans for Queen to enter the recording studio with Lambert. “It’s not coming along, no we’re not doing that,” he said. “Not at the moment anyway. We might do. At the moment, we’re watching with interest while Adam pursues his solo career, and it seems to be going very well. He’s an amazing, amazing artist, and there’s no getting away from that. It’s very interesting to watch him develop.

“We’re very conscious that he doesn’t want to be with us all the time – that would be so wrong, for us to just envelop him and never let him go off and do anything else,” May went on. “So it’s very important that his own career is progressing now. We’re looking forward to being back together in September to do Rock in Rio, and some dates in Argentina and Venezuela, I believe.”